Day: January 19, 2020

Members of an organization who want former national security advisor John Bolton to testify in the impeachment hearings against U.S. Republican President Donald Trump will reportedly put out ads in six states.

A modern populist movement with the twin goals of expanding individual liberty and strengthening the bonds of community exists as a result of a communications revolution that has empowered people to control their own lives. That’s good news. The danger, however, is that the new populism will succumb to the old temptations of collectivism—a devolution made possible by the conflation and prioritization of virtual community over traditional community.

Americans remember Benjamin Franklin as one of our founders. That is fitting because he was not just our most famous citizen at our country’s birth, but he was also so much a central part of that birth that he has been called “The First American.”

The Supreme Court took up two high-profile disputes Friday as it rounds out its docket for the 2019-2020 term, agreeing to decide on the Trump administration’s bid to enforce exemptions from the Obamacare contraception mandate for religious dissenters, and whether state laws punishing “faithless” presidential electors are unconstitutional.

Thirty miles west of Cleveland along the Lake Erie shoreline sits a town named Lorain, Ohio. Famous for being the birthplace of Toni Morrison, Lorain was once a bustling steel town that drew people from all over the country for manufacturing work. Even the high school football team was named “The Steelmen.” But today, like many Rust Belt towns, Lorain shows signs of decay: ramshackle houses, vacant buildings covered in graffiti, and abandoned plants and factories — lots of them.

In Mark Helprin’s humorous and insightful novel Freddy and Fredericka, Freddy, the bumbling Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, and his spoiled wife Fredericka, are dispatched on a special mission: to conquer the United States of America.

U.S. Sen. Benjamin Wade of Ohio, the chamber’s president pro tempore, for a time stood one vote away from becoming president in the Senate’s impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison joined 15 attorneys general and New York City in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration over changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as food stamps.